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Stuart Garfield
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Employee training programs show signs of improvement
By Jim Schakenbach, Special to Mass High Tech
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The year 2009 is one that many businesspeople would probably like to forget. Sales and budgets took a hit, companies shed employees, and overhead was slashed across the board. “Flat is the new up” was the grim joke making the rounds.
Among the casualties were many employee training and professional development programs.
“There’s no question that budgets for professional training are under pressure because of the economy,” said Bob Eubank, executive director of the Northeast Human Resources Association, a Waltham-based HR industry advocacy group. “In some cases, training was simply neglected.”
Professional training can often make the difference between companies being industry leaders or second-stringers. Some companies, however, were caught between a rock and a hard place, recognizing the value of employee training programs but helpless to deflect the full blow of budget cuts as they looked at every budget and program for ways to squeeze the red ink out of them.
“The economy definitely played a part in the funding of our employee training and development,” said Melissa Lawrence, director of human resources for travel industry software developer ITA Software Inc. in Cambridge.
And the same story held among the tech workers of non-technology companies.
“We had a force reduction this past August, so we needed to look at our resources and use them in the most effective way,” said Pam Wing, director of end user support services at South Coast Health System in New Bedford. “Our IT staff used to go to user group conferences every year. This year, no one went.”
For 2010, however, technology investments also mean training investments.
Waltham-based Accounting Management Solutions Inc.’s human resources director Rita Vogel tells a similar tale. “We have a formal training program for our consultants to improve their skill sets and keep them current on topics pertinent to our industry so they can talk knowledgeably to their clients,” says Vogel. “This year we reduced the program, cutting the training budget and time in half, but we kept the program alive.”
Many companies began to feel the effects of professional development cutbacks in ways they perhaps didn’t anticipate. The 2009/2010 U.S. Strategic Rewards Survey reported that employee engagement levels for key personnel dropped almost 25 percent as a result of restructuring and employee benefit cutbacks, including professional development and training, indicating a significant slump in employee morale and productivity.
“When you go through what’s basically a reorganization, you create some very defined areas of improvement and the staff morale really goes way down because they’re really concerned about keeping their jobs,” said Wing.
Yet despite these grim realities, many HR directors see a silver lining in the economic black cloud.
“We found that when you take something away, people value it more,” according to ITA’s Lawrence. “We started getting feedback that people really valued training and they were disappointed that ITA wasn’t offering as much professional growth training as they would have liked. We realized training was important for retaining good employees and an investment we needed to make, so we got together a group of managers to determine what kind of training our employees were really looking for in 2010. We got as much specific information as possible so we could make sure we met the needs of the employee base.”
To try to meet both employee needs and budget limitations, ITA is turning more toward peer-led training sessions. “Instead of sending 10 people to a conference, we’ll send two or three people and they come back and train others,” said Lawrence. “We’re actually beginning to invest more in training, but we’re trying to spend our dollars in the most effective and efficient way possible.”
At South Coast, staff reduction could be viewed as the classic half-full/half-empty glass. According to Wing, the reduction in force raised the bar for the remaining staff.
“This year we’re deploying new technologies, going from paper records to electronic records, so we really needed to raise the remaining employees’ skill levels and training to bring them to a point where they can support this new technology infrastructure,” she said. As a result, South Coast has made a major investment in outside training to provide A+ proficiency certification for its tech employees.
“For some people, their grade levels went up for their job descriptions, which increases their salary levels as well,” said Wing. “We want to make sure we continue our training process to keep the staff skill levels up there. We’ve actually done more this year than in the past.”
Vogel is cautiously optimistic. “We’ll stay on the leaner side for 2010, but we’ll continue to offer critical and relevant training to our staff.”
NEHRA’s Eubank sees a better year ahead. “We do see some indications that things are coming back,” he said. “The pressure is starting to let up as organizations realize they need to keep their talent and keep them engaged. Training’s a big part of that. We’re hoping to see a more tangible recovery in 2010.”
Jim Schakenbach is a freelance writer in Jefferson.
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